Dirty Dozen

Dirty Dozen is a freeware Macintosh board game released in late 1993 by Nick Triantos and distributed through Info-Mac and umich's mac/game/board collection. The 1.0.1 update from January 1994 fixed a few non-critical bugs in the original 1.0 release while keeping the game free for hobbyist players on the era's compact and color Macs.

Origin and release

The game was first submitted to several archive sites in early December 1993 as version 1.0. Author Nick Triantos posted the 1.0.1 patch from his netcom.com address on January 4, 1994, asking archive maintainers to replace the original copy. The work is Copyright 1993 Nick Triantos and explicitly designated freeware.

Distribution

Like most Info-Mac board titles of the period, Dirty Dozen circulated as a BinHex 4.0 archive (.hqx) extracted with StuffIt. It was filed under the board-game subdirectory of the Info-Mac game collection alongside titles such as Achi and the Online Tic-Tac-Toe series.

Era and audience

Dirty Dozen is representative of the small, single-author shareware and freeware board games that flourished on the Mac in the early 1990s, when individual hobbyists used Usenet and Info-Mac as their primary distribution channel. Players today typically run it under emulators such as Mini vMac or SheepShaver.

Preservation note

The Info-Mac copy of dirty-dozen-101.hqx is the canonical surviving distribution. No screenshots accompany the BinHex archive; the original submission text is the primary source for what is known about the game.